UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) How to Find God in the Dutch Golden Age Bussels, S.; van Oostveldt, B. DOI 10.1080/03096564.2016.1250449 Publication date 2017 Document Version Final published version Published in Dutch Crossing License CC BY-NC-ND Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Bussels, S., & van Oostveldt, B. (2017). How to Find God in the Dutch Golden Age. Dutch Crossing, 41(3), 195-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2016.1250449 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:25 Sep 2021 DUTCH CROSSING, Vol. 41 No. 3, November 2017, 195–209 How to Find God in the Dutch Golden Age Stijn Bussels Leiden University, NL Bram Van Oostveldt University of Amsterdam, NL In the 1654 tragedy Lucifer Joost van den Vondel shows how the titular character revolts against God because he cannot fathom His plans. Vondel presents Lucifer as an identifiable character within the format of the tragedy. Hence, the poet breaks with the long-standing tradition of representing the character as completely baleful and depraved. Even though this tragedy is one of the most discussed works in Dutch literary history, the question why Vondel chose Lucifer as the leading character for a tragedy remains unanswered. To contextualize Vondel’s choice, this article first discusses an interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis from the author’s milieu. Leiden humanist Daniel Heinsius uses this concept to point out how problems with which a tragedy deeply confronts its audience realize an emotional habituation and enforce the correct handling of similar problems in the world outside the theatre. Likewise, with the representation of Lucifer’s harrowing doubts concerning God’s plans, Vondel wanted to teach his audience how to deal with their own problems with divine inscrutability. By presenting and even magnifying the doubts about God in the tragedy, the theatre-maker wanted to purify the audience from these doubts. The genesis of the devil is the ideal subject matter for a tragedy to reinforce the audience’s faith. KEYWORDS: Vondel, catharsis, Biblical tragedy, modernity © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. DOI 10.1080/03096564.2016.1250449 196 STIJN BUSSELS AND BRAM VAN OOSTVELDT Introduction In 1654, Joost van de Vondel created the tragedy Lucifer in which the genesis of the devil is performed in the Amsterdam theatre.1 In the tragedy, the problems start when God’s messenger Gabriel proclaims that all angels have to serve God’s latest creation, Adam. Archangel Lucifer cannot manage to understand God’s wish from the conviction that the heavenly state of the angels is highly elevated above the terrestrial state of men. In the tragedy Vondel concentrates on Lucifer’s quest to get further explanations concerning His wish. Eventually this quest proves to be fruitless, as the titular character does not succeed in reaching God directly. Lucifer is not satisfied with His representations: nor with His spokesmen, nor with the splendour of His name. In the end he has to accept the harsh consequences of his solid belief in the superiority of the angels and leads a revolt against God. Hence the archangel tumbles down deeply. From the nineteenth-century rise of literary studies onwards the tragedy took up a firm position in the canon of Dutch theatre.2 In the nineteenth century it was also a point of political discussion; historians saw Vondel’s Lucifer as an allegory by relating the titular character with agitators such as William of Orange or Oliver Cromwell, thus trying to find out Vondel’s particular position on some very keen political and religious debates that were still relevant after two centuries.3 Also many twentieth-century scholars looked at the religious aspects of the tragedy and saw Lucifer rather as a theological doctrine than a theatre play.4 Among other scholars, the literary historians Wisse Smit and Kare Langvik-Johannessen reacted on this too confined and specific frame of interpretation.5 In the debate, they introduced the idea that Vondel gave the character of Lucifer a universal appeal by providing a thorough analysis of the crucial characteristics of the character. In Vondel’s own words these were haughtiness and envy. These analyses of Vondel’s Lucifer are only sufficient to a certain extent. In essence, we can say that they did not put enough consideration into the fact that Vondel used the word tragedy (treurspel) in the subtitle of Lucifer.6 We will clarify that Lucifer is primarily a theatre character who, as Vondel explicitly states in his foreword to the tragedy, has to raise fear and pity: “Het wit en ooghmerck der wettige Treurspelen is de menschen te vermorwen door schrick, en medoogen”, or “The goal and intention of legitimate Tragedies is to placate people by fear and pity” (179–180).7 Therefore, we concentrate on the question why Vondel specifically chose Lucifer, full of haughtiness and envy, as the titular character of a tragedy that primarily needs to arouse fear and pity for the leading character in the audience? To formulate an answer to this question, we will first discuss how Vondel presents fear and pity as the primal goal of a tragedy. Therefore, we will discuss the poetical theory of the Leiden humanist Daniel Heinsius who greatly influenced Vondel. In his De constitutione tragoediae (1611) Heinsius interprets Aristotle’s concept of catharsis by pointing at the fact that the tragedy can move the audience in a subconscious, yet piercing way. The problems with which a tragedy deeply confronts its audience make that that audience builds up an emotional resistance, hence it learns to correctly deal with everyday problems similar to the ones performed in the theatre. Thus the theatre functions as a training school for our emotions. HOW TO FIND GOD IN THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE 197 From theatre theory we will depart to theatre practice and look at how Vondel uses his titular character to stir up feelings of fear and pity in the audience. We will analyse some prominent scenes from the tragedy focussing on the relationship between Lucifer and God. Vondel presents Lucifer as a tragic character who fruitlessly searches for his pre-eminent antagonist. First, we will discuss how the poet presents the problem of Lucifer as a general problem in heaven. Not only Lucifer, but the other angels miss direct contact with God, too. Second, we will focus on how Vondel lets the main, titular part have a very emotional conversation with his friend Raphael. The playwright arouses fear and pity in his audience by putting the emphasis on the fear and pity that Raphael feels for Lucifer’s doubtful issues with God. By presenting and even magnifying the doubts about God on stage in a highly emotional way, the playwright wanted to purify the audience from these doubts. The genesis of the devil is ideal subject matter for a tragedy that aims to reinforce the audience’s faith. A True Story We can start our discussion of the theatre theory with Vondel’s preface to Lucifer. The poet begins this preface by emphasising that the subject matter of Lucifer is not mythi- cal, but really happened. Moreover, it is no common terrestrial history, but history that directly concerns God.8 This holy history is the ideal subject matter, as Vondel explicitly writes, to encourage righteousness and devoutness, to eschew shortage of these, and to be conscious of all misery that this shortage can bring along (v. 177–78).9 Moreover, Vondel discusses the medium of the theatre as a means to enforce the reli- gious message. According to the poet, the combination of holy history and theatre is a very powerful tool to let the true Christian faith pervade society deeply. He clarifies this with the help of a story from the Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607) of Cesare Baronio. In it, Vondel found the description of the life of Saint Genesius and Saint Ardaleo. Both were pagan actors whom God managed to enlighten and proselytize right in the middle of one of their theatre performances. During a comedy in which both actors were acting and in which they originally wanted to mock Christian faith, they started to take their characters seriously and took the truths of Christianity at heart. Genesius and Ardaleo suddenly realized that the thing they ridiculed had far more power than their own ridicule. After his discussion of the power of performance on players in his preface to Lucifer, Vondel pays attention to the performance’s impact on the theatregoers.